I admit it. I goofed. Despite being a financial planner who often helps people with their benefits, I made a mistake with my own. As I was looking at my expenses and taxes for last year, I realized that I could have reduced my taxes by $230. That’s the amount I would have saved if I contributed the $817 I spent on eligible vision and dental expenses last year to my company’s limited-purpose FSA (flexible spending account). Read more

It always amazes me how people overlook their employee benefits and will pay out-of-pocket for what they can in some cases, get for free. Years ago, I worked with a couple in which the wife was diagnosed with breast cancer about 5 years ago but thankfully, is in remission. They were trying to get their estate plan in order and had hired their friend’s attorney to help them. Several thousand dollars later, they wondered if they made the right choice. Since I am not an attorney, I would never give legal advice, but I had to admit to them that considering the simplicity of their estate and wishes, they had an amazingly complex plan. Read more

No, I’m not talking about Roth contributions. If your employer’s retirement plan offers this option, you may be able to contribute more than the annual limit of $17,500 (or $23,000 if you’re 50 or older) to your plan in the form of “after-tax” contributions. As the name implies, the contributions are taxed before you put them into the plan. And unlike Roth contributions (which are also “after-tax”), the earnings are taxed when you withdraw them. Read more

With Veteran’s Day around the corner, we stop to thank those, past and present, who have served our nation and protected our freedoms. We all know that they volunteer to spend time away from home and family and risk their lives to keep us safe. The tragic stories of service members suffering from PTSD and life altering injuries tear at our hearts. What no one talks about is the financial hardships that many of our service members face. Read more

Now that we are in the midst of open-enrollment season, this is a great time to start looking at how the trends in health insurance may impact you and your family. In the last few weeks, Wal-Mart has announced that they will no longer offer health insurance to certain part-time employees. Other large employers are rolling out new plans that will either charge a steep premium to cover spouses that have coverage available at their employer, or they are not offering coverage to those spouses with their own option at all. In addition to all of this, there is an undeniable trend towards high-deductible health plans paired with a Health Savings Account (HSA). Read more

Labor Day weekend is always an enjoyable time in our family’s household as we usually try to get in a trip to the beach, have a cookout, and welcome in the college football season (which is a pretty big deal in our part of the world). Hopefully you and your friends and family have been able to work some fun into the schedule over the long weekend. (If you had to actually clock in at work today, be sure to find some time for rest and relaxation soon to make up for working on the federal holiday.) Read more

Fall has arrived, and that means open enrollment is just right around the corner.For many employees, this provides the window of opportunity to sign up for either an HSA or FSA in order to set aside pre-tax dollars for your out-of-pocket healthcare costs. Not quite sure what the difference is between these 2 types of accounts? Well, you are not alone. In a recent Fidelity survey, two-thirds of those surveyed said they simply do not understand how an HSA works and “a full 73 percent of respondents said an HSA is pretty much the same thing as a health FSA or were unsure, and the ‘use it or lose it’ provision of FSAs was one of the most commonly misunderstood differences between the account types.” Read more

One of the results from our recent research report that has gotten a lot of attention is that we saw an increase in the number of employees’ accessing their 401(k) balances through loans and hardship withdrawals from about a quarter in 2011 to about a third in 2012. The conventional wisdom is that this means employees need to do a better job with money management and in particular, building an emergency fund of at least 3-6 months of necessary expenses and maybe even more. For someone just starting out, I think this is absolutely true. Read more

What’s the new craze for baby showers? They’re not co-ed and action-packed, based on the party I attended this past weekend for my stepson and daughter-in-law’s first child. The baby shower was held at the bowling alley, and after presents and cake, we all bowled for an hour, with the exception of the mother-to-be, since she already has a bowling ball size belly. Read more

This past weekend, I said a sad final farewell to a friend. Just a few months shy of his 50th birthday, he passed away after a long battle with Machado-Joseph’s Disease. The symptoms remind me of Lou Gehrig’s Disease, only in slow motion, with a very slow progression of muscle control. Read more